WASHINGTON—The Rev. William Barber II, the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign, is well-known for publicizing the plight of more than 140 million poor and low-wealth people in the U.S. But on April 2 he waded into the middle of another battle, over abortion. And there, he linked political “kings” with budget-cutters, saying both trash human needs.
Speaking to a large crowd by phone, Barber discussed a comprehensive report and recommendations to congressional leaders about how to solve the nation’s problems in income and wealth inequality, a crusade co-chair the Rev. Liz Theoharis and he have led for years.
One plank in the campaign’s platform is reproductive rights—and that was the conflict that played out in front and inside the Supreme Court before and after Barber spoke.
The justices inside heard arguments over South Carolina’s denial of the right of women seeking abortions to sue when the state banned them from using Medicaid to pick a provider of their choice. In practical terms, that’s an abortion ban, pro-choice lawyers told the High Court.
Outside, a large crowd of pro-choice advocates vowed to fight for the right to abortion, even if the justices rule against them. Speakers included Dr. A. Taylor Walker, president of the Service Employees’ sector of the Committee of Interns and Residents, and Rep. Kelly Morrison, DFL-Minn., Congress’s “first and only pro-abortion obstetrician and gynecologist.”
And right alongside the large pro-choice crowd was a smaller group of anti-abortion crusaders, who tried to drown out the larger group’s speakers by using a louder bullhorn, but failed.
In the cacophony, Barber stuck to income inequality. He declared the budget blueprint the Republican-run Congress narrowly approved earlier this year takes from the poor and gives to the rich, by setting up cuts in Medicaid and other pro-people programs to fund another $4.5 trillion 10-year Trump-GOP tax cut for corporations and the rich.
And all at the behest of the man Barber again characterized as parading like “a king,” Republican abortion foe and oligarchic President Donald Trump. Barber repeated that comparison on April 2.
“This kind of budget is a budget for the greedy and a budget for the takers,” he stated before Poor People’s Campaign representatives entered the U.S. Capitol to present the campaign’s latest analysis of problems and solutions to lawmakers.
“How much can they take from children? How much can they take from LGBTQ people? How much can they take from workers? How much can they take from our democracy?”
The answer, from the campaign’s report, is apparently quite a lot. Just its critique of the state of policy towards workers today—not to mention the poor–makes that clear. Among its key points:
- “Largely as a result of new leadership and increased funding, the National Labor Relations Board was able to more adequately support workers’ rights to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.
- “By nominating strong workers’ rights advocates to fill vacancies purposely left to hollow out the agency, and by securing the largest increase in funding for the NLRB in nearly a decade,” board members whom Democratic President Joe Biden named “reversed a lot of the priorities that corporate lobby groups persuaded the first Trump board to enact.
- “Trump wasted zero time in curtailing labor protections, starting by illegally removing NLRB Board Chair Gwynne Wilcox for ‘unduly disfavoring the interests of employers.’” Though Wilcox sued and won to get her board seat back, her removal both “robbed the board of the quorum necessary to act but also gutted the agency’s independence.”
Board members can’t be neutral about enforcing labor law and the board itself becomes “non-operational” the report said, if Trump can remove its members at will. Removing Wilcox “made it clear board members…should favor employers if they want to keep their jobs.
“It’s worth noting the $290 million Elon Musk paid to influence the 2024 election is on par with the NLRB’s $299 million budget,” the report drily noted. “The NLRB had filed a complaint against Musk’s company SpaceX.” Multibillionaire Musk, a labor law-breaker at SpaceX and Tesla, controls Trump.
- Trump’s executive orders “removed long-standing job protections for federal career employees, making it easier to fire these workers for any reason. These efforts also included overturning previous executive orders that protected the rights of federal workers to collectively bargain.” The report was written and printed before Trump’s latest anti-union moves, obliterating the union contract covering 45,000 Transportation Security Officers—the airport screeners—and planning to eliminate 30 other pacts.
- The overall decline in unionization over the past five decades can be solved only if Congress strengthens labor law “by ensuring workers can reach a first contract and that establishes civil monetary penalties for employers who violate labor rights.” Those are two key goals of the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, labor’s top legislative priority.
- “Unions help improve earnings, working conditions, and equity. Unionized workers earn on average 13.5% more in wages than their non-unionized peers. The relatively higher union wage premium for workers of color also means unions help narrow racial and ethnic pay gaps.”
Ending those gaps and empowering more workers of color with union wage premiums is not only financially right and beneficial to the economy but morally right. “Protecting the rights of workers to engage in collective bargaining is even more important today as President Trump has called for the removal of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in the federal government,” the report adds.
But the battle over the budget, “which is about funding war,” Barber said, in blueprints which Congress’s ruling Republicans approved, got drowned out in the demonstrations about abortion rights.
“That means we must call for a mass movement across America” to change the nation’s priorities. “If we have to march, let’s march. If we have to engage in peaceful civil disobedience, let’s do that.
“Trump and Musk want to be kings. But our knees do not bow down to those who want to rule over us. Our knees bow down only to God.”
Out in the plaza in front of the Supreme Court, nobody—not Barber’s staffers, not pro-abortion crusaders, not the SEIU’s Dr. Walker, and not Rep. Morrison or other lawmakers—bowed down. But they didn’t hit Barber’s themes, either. Protecting reproductive rights, and restoring the nationwide right to abortion, even in South Carolina, was their goal.
“The system is broken,” Dr. Walker, whose SEIU sector represents 37,000 physicians, residents, and interns nationally. She knew that from personal experience. As a Memphis, Tenn., native, she grew up being preached about “Southern attitudes” that abortion is sinful and wrong.
And then, at age 23 as a university grad student, she was raped by an abusive partner.
“I felt completely alone. I couldn’t tell my friends and family, so I went to Planned Parenthood for advice. Planned Parenthood saved my life” through counseling and a medical abortion, even after “the Tennessee legislature” forced her to wait two weeks for a fetal heartbeat.
“The legislature thought that anti-choice bullshit would make me change my mind. The day after, still bleeding and cramping, I started down the path to become an abortion provider” which she’s been doing—but not in Tennessee—for a dozen years. “I do what I can to save patients from violence, sexism, and racism.
“I’ve been told as a young white woman in the South to ‘stay quiet’ and ‘stay in my lane.’ Well, fuck that.”
“We have a national health care crisis that has only gotten worse” since the Supreme Court’s right-wing Republican five-justice majority ended the national constitutional right to an abortion 13 years ago, said Minnesota’s Rep. Morrison, the obstetrician-gynecologist.
“Today’s Supreme Court should terrify all of us. Politicians should not decide which doctor should save you and which clinic you should go to.
“We shouldn’t have our Supreme Court ripping away our access to health care in the United States of America.
CONTRIBUTOR
